AI Smart Glasses Promise Workplace Wonders, Compliance Risks

AI-powered smart glasses are quickly moving into the business mainstream.

The tools are guiding warehouse workers to quickly find products to ship, helping workers assemble cars, and even assisting surgeons be more precise during complicated surgeries. But the promising technology is raising concerns about legal and privacy risks in tandem with its increased use.

Louis Rosenberg, a pioneer of virtual and augmented reality, said he expects the glasses to be widely adopted in industrial settings and eventually, much more broadly, functioning more as partner than just displaying information passively. “We could easily imagine a world where people will be wearing these glasses because they’re going to bring an AI assistant with them into a meeting, any kind of meeting,” he said.

A successful breakout of the technology would open up thorny legal issues about personal information and privacy. “We could be capturing not just private information about the business, but we could be capturing views of people who could be customers, of people who could be outside the organization,” Rosenberg said.

In the latest sign that the technology has arrived, Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sept. 17 announced a new line-up of AI glasses for the retail market, equipped for video calls, text messages and able to show AI-generated answers visually.

On the Verge of ‘Cobotics’

ABI Research, a firm that provides market intelligence for tech, estimates that the market for AI powered smart-glasses will explode in the next few years driven by demand from consumers and industry, jumping from 3.3 million units in 2024 to 13 million units in 2026.

But broad usage is already here in industrial settings.

RealWear, a company that sells smart glasses, counts Coca Cola Co., Ford Motor Co. and Shell Plc among its clients. Sebastian Beetschen, Realwear’s CEO, said the company’s smart glasses help Coca Cola deliver goods more efficiently. “If you put the pallet in the wrong truck, it costs a lot to get it back,” Beetschen said. “They’ve managed to increase the accuracy massively and increasing the speed to numbers that are very unusual in logistics.”

A video shared by Vuzix, a New York based company, show what a wearer sees while wearing the glasses. A factory worker asks, “AI, is this the correct gasket for the repair task?” The device tells him: “Yes, that is the correct replacement gadget for the flange assembly.”

Source: Vuzix

The worker then instructs the glasses to document the process and flag it for training.

“It can watch and document and support and write the reports at the end, even if you’re a maintenance guy that’s doing a repair job on something,” said Paul Travers, the CEO and the founder of Vuzix.

He described this kind of work as “cobotics,” where a human and a robot work together, for example, on a factory production line or for maintenance.

Travers said Amazon Inc. uses Vuzix’s glasses for equipment maintenance in its warehouses.

The glasses can support a doctor performing a surgery. They also have a teaching role, enabling students to see exactly what a doctor is seeing, such as making sure that a knee is aligned correctly before pins go in during surgery. Doctors Without Borders, an international humanitarian group, uses them; so does Rods & Cones, a company specializing in remote collaboration services for accessing operating rooms, Travers said.

In December, Vuzix announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was expanding its use of smart glasses during field inspections and service jobs after two years of trials.

A Fine Balance

Wider use will inevitably bring more risks.

Employees, for example, could have questions about being tracked by cameras and microphones, because employers will know exactly what a worker is doing continuously through the day— a previously unimaginable level of surveillance, Rosenberg, the AI glasses specialist, said.

“It will take some time to kind of work out a balance where the employer is getting a value that they want out of the technology, but the employees feel like they have some privacy in the workplace,” he said.

Already, a bill (AB1331) introduced in the California Legislature in February would limit use of any tools used for workplace surveillance.

Sahara Pynes,an employment lawyer at Fox Rothschild LLP, a national law firm, said that companies deploying the technology need to vet and review the contracts. “There’s no way that the technology company is going to assume the risk of the device not complying with law,” she said.

Employers also have to ensure that workers using the glasses don’t record any proprietary processes or products behind the scenes that could get out into a public arena, she said.

Beetschen said the products go through multiple audits to minimize legal and privacy risks; Travers said that the data that the Vuzix glasses use are very specific and they only record what’s needed for the job.

“If we’re using a camera on the glasses for object detection or product recognition, we automatically blur faces in the processing of that, we lock devices down if they go out of certain areas,” said Lars Heemskerk, CEO of Augmex, a reseller of Vuzix glasses in the EU.

Patrick Dennison, a partner at Fisher Phillips, who specializes in workplace safety and health, said the OSHA application seemed particularly fraught for companies. “Unless the person who is escorting the inspector has the same type of technology, employers could be at a disadvantage if that occurs,” Dennison said.

“The other consideration is that, it’s the plain view doctrine,” he added. “Anything that OSHA sees as they’re walking through the work site could potentially be fair game for violations.” The agency did not reply to a request for comment.